"Andrew Wyeth: Remembrance" exhibit at Seattle Art Museum features "Helga" paintings

In January of this year the great, yet oft-criticized, American painter Andrew Wyeth died at the age of 91. Wyeth, best known for his paintings of life in rural Maine and Pennsylvania, established a national and international reputation with his superb realism and emotionally tense scenes, as in the famous painting "Christina's World," in which a woman sits in an expansive field, her back to the viewer as her whole body seems to lean achingly toward a farmhouse in the distance. Wyeth's paintings of austere rural life, his detailed precision and his popular appeal put him at odds with many proponents of modern art. Immediately after Wyeth's death, the art world sprang into action, surveying and analyzing his career and legacy.

The Seattle Art Museum put together a tribute to Wyeth in the form of a small exhibition that opens today. Rather than attempting to quickly cobble together a mini-survey of his decades-long career, curator Patricia Junker smartly chose a tight focus, bringing together seven paintings that focus on Wyeth's life in Chadds Ford, Pa., where he was raised, spent most of his adulthood — except for the summers he spent in Maine — and where he died.

While the two earlier works in the small show — one of his wife, Betsy, and the other of his neighbor's farm — are worth spending a lot of time in front of, the obvious stunners in the exhibition are the five "Helga" paintings from the 1970s and '80s. Wyeth painted Helga Testorf, a German woman who worked as a neighbor's caregiver, hundreds of times over 18 years — in his neighbor's house, in his sister's studio, outside, frontally, from the back, clothed and in the nude — keeping the paintings hidden from his wife and the public. When he made the paintings known in 1986, there was a great deal of excitement and controversy over the unknown suite of paintings, the attempts to publicize and market the paintings, and the nature of the relationship between artist and model.

It's best to temporarily set aside the titillating secrecy and just look at the paintings, which Wyeth created in his favorite medium, dry-brush watercolor. Yes, the paintings are characteristically Wyeth-esque in their moments of wonderful realism and areas of exquisite detail, but there is also a very painterly, abstract quality in the sweeping, luscious strokes of watercolor contrasted with his hyper-attention to areas of texture. Consider the titles of some of the works of art: "Velvet," "Braids," "Cape Coat." These are not specific narratives of an illicit affair or even particular statements about Spartan life in the country. These are fundamentally artistic constructions of light, line, texture, and form. Wyeth once said, "I think the great weakness in most of my work is subject matter. There's too much of it."

But there is also undeniable emotion in his work: complex, sometimes dark, ambiguous emotion. Wyeth said of "Overflow," one of the Helga paintings in which Testorf's nude body is flooded with a cool white light, "You have to feel deeply to do this kind of thing." His next words are quite telling: "I felt the country, the house, Germany, the dreamy moist, rich female smell — the whole thing." Wyeth's particular genius and broad appeal is rooted in this ability to imbue his insane specificity with remembrances of sensory and emotional experiences that speak profoundly to many of us.